Hello! Welcome to this week’s edition of Social Media News for Leaders of Nonprofits, Churches and Ministries.

We know you are busy. And we know that most of you don’t have the time to search the big world wide web for relevant social media news.

That is why, each week, we bring you the Top 5 Social Media News that you need to know for this week and present it to you.

This week we have news related to Facebook, WhatsApp, Google and YouTube.

Watch this video (below) to get your weekly dose of social media news, in less than 5 minutes.

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Top 5 Social Media News

News #1 – Two key announcements from Google I/O.

(Source Link) Our first news is about Google, especially about the big announcements that Google made at their developer conference, which concluded last week on the 9th of May.

There were lots of important releases and announcements about phones and devices. But I wanted to bring your attention to 2 key announcements that could point us towards what we need to be doing to keep Google happy.

Google is important. There are 40,000 searches every second on Google! Yes, every second. Which means 3.5 billion searches a day.

So you and I need to keep Google happy with our content. And to do that we need to know how they’re thinking.

Two news items point to how they’re thinking.

One is, they said they are going to start listing podcasts as part of the search results and people will be able to listen to podcasts right there within the search results.

For example, if you have a ministry that teaches on say, finances, if somebody comes and types “how to get out of debt”, then your podcast has a chance of showing up and people will be able to listen to that podcast right there. Isn’t that awesome?

The second news that got my attention was, about the artificially intelligent Google Assistant being plugged into every single device like Google Home, Nest Hub, and all these smart devices that Google is releasing. They are building the Assistant into it.

Which means the Assistant is so smart, it’s artificially intelligent, to figure out what content it needs to show to the user. So what does this show us?

As long as you and I create good content, relevant content for our audience, and package it, optimize it, and put it together in a way that Google understands it, then the chances of us showing up in Google search results for millions of people every day is very, very high.

So you focus on creating good content but don’t stop there. Optimize it for Google.

News #2 – Facebook’s co-founder says “It is time to breakup Facebook”

(Source Link) Last week there was an article in the New York Times by Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook.

Chris was with Mark Zuckerberg when he started Facebook out of Harvard and help him start the company. He wrote this article titled “It’s Time to Break up Facebook”.

So there’s this discussion about how big Facebook is getting, with all the three big names, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook belonging to the same organization, and completely controlled by Mark Zuckerberg. So there is this conversation going on.

The reason I wanted to talk about this news to you is that I want you to start thinking about diversifying your social or digital media activities. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket and depend on one channel, because the changes are inevitable in this space, right?

For various reasons, changes might come, but you as an organization should think of using different channels so that you are not affected by any change that comes.

News #3 – WhatsApp had a security breach

A spyware was able to use WhatsApp calls as an entry point into certain WhatsApp accounts.

Apparently, this problem seems to have been fixed.

If you update your WhatsApp app right now to the latest version, you should be okay. So if you haven’t updated, please go ahead and update your WhatsApp app.

But this news has really raised some eyebrows and people are concerned because usually WhatsApp is known for its security and end to end encryption.

News #4 – YouTube tool to auto-create video ads

(Source Link) Youtube is coming out with a tool that could help you easily and automatically create short video ads from longer videos.

I know this is going to be helpful to many ministries and nonprofits who use videos for communication. You could take a longer video and this tool will give you shorter video ads.

Video ads have been getting shorter and shorter from 30 seconds to 15 seconds. And now we have 6-second bumper ads. So creating them is not easy.

A tool like this could really help you do the job. So watch out for it.

News #5 – Facebook tell us how it ranks videos

(Source Link) Last week Facebook released details about how they rank videos on their platform. This is basically their way of telling us what kind of videos we need to create when we think of Facebook.

They have given 3 details or instructions.

One is they want us to create videos that have loyalty and intent, which means people look for those videos, they search for them, they come back and watch them – loyalty.

Second is viewing duration. Facebook wants longer videos. They are saying we want what youtube wants. They want to become a platform that has longer watch time, so they want longer videos.

Next is originality. They don’t want us to just reshare other videos, but they want us to create original content. So keep those 3 things in mind when you create videos for Facebook.

That’s all we have for you this week. Have a wonderful week.

Do leave your comments, questions, feedback, and reviews. We will bring you a fresh set of the latest Social Media news for you next week.

Author of The Connected Church. Social Media and Digital Marketing Consultant for Nonprofits, Faith-based Organisations, Churches and Ministries. You can subscribe to Natchi’s email newsletter by clicking here.